8 Ways Meditation Can Benefit Your Life

8 Ways Meditation Can Benefit Your Life

Like everything, meditation takes practice. It is something that as westerners, we are not particularly accustomed to. However, with our busy lifestyles and on-the-go behaviors, meditation can truly benefit our overall wellbeing. At Hot 8 Yoga, we offer guided meditation practices or even open spaces to support your meditation practice.

Here are the best ways that meditation can benefit your life:

1. It reduces stress

Meditation helps promote the idea of an eased mind. While you’re mediating, the goal is to calm your mind and your thoughts. It allows you to take charge of your breath and your emotions.

2. It improves concentration

Meditation has been known to approve the ability to multitask. With a more regular meditation practice, you may find yourself more concentrated and less distracted.

3. It encourages a healthy lifestyle

When you do things that are better for your mind, you will inevitably do things that are better for your body. Promoting an overall consciousness to what you are doing for yourself through the day.

4. Increases self-awareness

When you mediate, you may find that you recognize your emotions better. For example, you can recognize your own anger or your own sadness and find that you can breath through it.

5. Meditation increases happiness

“Studies have shown that brain signaling increases in the left side of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for positive emotions, while activity decreases in the right side, responsible for negative emotions.”

6. It helps with acceptance

We cannot hold ourselves accountable for things that happen to us, or perhaps trials that we may have to go though. However, meditation and breath can aid you in accepting life as it may come.

7. It slows aging

“Cognition seems to be preserved in meditators,” says Sara Lazar, a researcher at Harvard University. Studies also show that meditators have more brain cells - more gray matter in their brains.

8. It benefits your immune health

Meditation promotes relaxation, “which increases the compound nitric oxide that causes blood vessels to open up and subsequently, blood pressure to drop.”

Join us for Meditation Monday on the first of every month and get a guest pass when you come!